organ donation
Incentivizing Plasma Donation for Convalescent Therapy
Kominers, Pathak, Sonmez, and Unver apply market design tools to incentivize convalescent therapy:
COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) therapy is currently a leading treatment for COVID-19. At present, there is a shortage of CCP relative to demand. We develop and analyze a model of centralized CCP allocation that incorporates both donation and distribution. In order to increase CCP supply, we introduce a mechanism that utilizes two incentive schemes, respectively based on principles of “paying it backward” and “paying it forward.” Under the first scheme, CCP donors obtain treatment vouchers that can be transferred to patients of their choosing. Under the latter scheme, patients obtain priority for CCP therapy in exchange for a future pledge to donate CCP if possible. We show that in steady-state, both principles generally increase overall treatment rates for all patients|not just those who are voucher-prioritized or pledged to donate. Our results also hold under certain conditions if a fraction of CCP is reserved for patients who participate in clinical trials. Finally, we examine the implications of pooling blood types on the efficiency and equity of CCP distribution.
The idea is quite similar to the “no give, no take” rule for organ donation that I have promoted for many years. Namely, if you don’t sign your organ donor card you go to the back of the queue should you ever need an organ donation. Israel adopted the idea some years ago by giving points to people who signed their organ donor card. As with no-give, no-take, the point of the rules that Kominers et al. promote isn’t fairness per se but rather as an incentive to increase donations and thus increase the supply of plasma.
Monday assorted links
1. “With Choi Soon-sil-gate, Park Geun-hye put the entire country into the Tyson Zone.”
2. Transmissible vaccines? (speculative)
3. Will machines run Singaporean food courts?
4. Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry, due out in April you can now pre-order.
5. Zombies for organ donation.
6. The flattening of the internet through video. And is it better to record reel-to-reel than digital?
Assorted links
1. Markets in everything, the culture that is France.
2. Brad DeLong on timing and sequencing.
3. Peter Boettke on Five Books.
4. Website for improving health news reporting, and why different weather predictions?; a systematic paper on this topic would be good.
Wealth and income inequality have been falling
And that is bad! (Never reason from an income inequality decline.) Despite a recent rebound, equity prices are still down considerably from their peaks, and of course that in percentage terms is a larger loss for wealthier people. Here is one part of my latest Bloomberg column:
And it’s not as if people on the lower end of the income scale feel happier or more healthy because the wealthiest are now poorer. For most Americans, life goes on; their main economic concern is that high inflation will eat into potential wage gains.
Nor is it the case that the proletariat have taken hold of the reins of power and a new populist utopia is nigh. The very wealthy might make fewer political donations, but the influence of money on politics was overrated in the first place. It hardly seems like a new era of egalitarian redistribution. Instead, Western government budgets are fairly tight, and in the US in particular the set of plausible policy alternatives is likely to get more narrow.
For at least two decades, the attention given to rising income and wealth inequality was huge, among both policymakers and academics. Over the last decade, the attention given to falling income and wealth inequality has been tiny.
Perhaps our views end up biased, can you imagine that? And to close:
I am by no means convinced that this reduction in inequality will continue. Forthcoming technological advances will have unpredictable effects. But if the last decade proves to be an interlude, there is still a lesson: Maybe inequality wasn’t the problem in the first place. That’s why I’m not cheering at its decline, and why I suspect not everyone else is, either. The real challenge isn’t how to reduce the difference in wealth between the rich and the poor. It’s how to reduce poverty.
I thank Brian Chau and Matt Yglesias for relevant pointers, without implicating either one in my take.
The Ukrainian economist who is fighting the Russians with logistics
This Bloomberg piece by Scott Duke Kominers is an interview with the heroic Tymofiy Mylovanov. He is an economist, also of the University of Pittsburgh, who is organizing many of the logistics in Ukraine and also running the Kyiv School of Economics. I am honored to know Tymofiy, here is one bit of a much broader story:
Mylovanov: Within the first couple of days, you see how people respond differently. Some people get traumatized; some become dysfunctional; others become almost super-efficient, like me and my team. But you have to figure out how to function in war or you die. Your loved ones will die. And we had a plan — war-time protocols at the university. We even had a war committee, and everyone was responsible for specific tasks, and they have to start executing them. Otherwise we collapse.
If someone doesn’t show up to a meeting, that doesn’t matter. Decisions are made without them. No wavering, no trembling hand. You either do it or you don’t do it and you accept the consequences. So we managed to shut down our facilities and put security in our buildings and the people there had food and water, and they’ve been staying there for two weeks.
There is much more detail in the article, which is interesting throughout. And:
Mylovanov: One specific thing: We need 307,000 medical kits. I have the specification. Let’s say Israel can only supply 30,000 and Canada probably can supply 20 or 30,000. But we have suppliers who can provide the medical kits. We give this specification to [Ukraine’s] Ministry of Health, and our charitable foundation will pay. So tag me or email me or ping me on Twitter — and then donate, please donate.
All the fundraising goes directly to logistics. I have a website at the university of the charitable foundation [Kyiv School of Economics Humanitarian Relief Fund], and there is a Twitter post at my account. If I get a hundred dollars on that charitable foundation, it goes towards medical kits and it’s likely going to save a life.
By the way, Tymofiy Mylovanov is widely published in economics journals, including Econometrica and JET. Here is Tymofiy on Twitter.
From Ryan Petersen at Flexport
“I just couldn’t sit around watching this humanitarian crisis in Ukraine without doing anything about it. So Flexport is organizing a massive airlift of relief goods to refugee camps in Eastern Europe starting next week.
You can read more about the full operation below. It’s inspiring stuff.
We’re looking to raise money to pay for more flights—Flexport is covering the first full cargo plane full of relief goods, but we’re asking others to donate including potential corporate sponsors to help us pay for more flights.
Donations are open at Flexport.org/donate and fully tax-deductible through our 501c3 partners.”
Thursday assorted links
1. Tips for slowing livestock growth due to plant closures.
3. Florian Schneider has passed away.
4. Source code for the Imperial College model. And Sue Denim is very upset about the quality of that source code. Another reader with a strong technical background wrote me equally critical remarks. Are there further opinions on this?
5. Sujatha Gidla on her experience with Covid-19 (NYT), and here is my earlier CWT with her, one of my favorite episodes.
6. A new real-time journal COVID Economics.
7. Tankersley interviews Hassett and covers the brouhaha (NYT).
8. Effective Altruist forum ranks Fast Grants as one of their top two projects.
10. Jerry Seinfeld on success.
11. “A county in Washington State dealing with a coronavirus outbreak has identified a confounding new source of spread: “Covid-19 parties” organized so that people can deliberately mingle with an infected person in the hope of getting their own illness out of the way.” (NYT link) I wonder what they play for the music.
12. How are the social sciences evolving? Less rational choice, for one thing.
13. Why are meatpacking plants hit so hard? Holds true for numerous countries — is it the deliberate circulation of cool air?
14. Emily Oster and Galit Alter have a new Covid public health information site.
Emergent Ventures prize winners for coronavirus work
I am happy to announce the first cohort of Emergent Ventures prize winners for their work fighting the coronavirus. Here is a repeat of the original prize announcement, and one week or so later I am delighted there are four strong winners, with likely some others on the way. Again, this part of Emergent Ventures comes to you courtesy of the Mercatus Center and George Mason University. Here is the list of winners:
Social leadership prize: Helen Chu and her team at the University of Washington. Here is a NYT article about Helen Chu’s work, excerpt:
Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time…
As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.
To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.
By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.
What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.
And to think Helen is only an assistant professor.
Data gathering and presentation prize: Avi Schiffmann
Here is a good write-up on Avi Schiffmann, excerpt:
A self-taught computer maven from Seattle, Avi Schiffmann uses web scraping technology to accurately report on developing pandemic, while fighting misinformation and panic.
Avi started doing this work in December, remarkable prescience, and he is only 17 years old. Here is a good interview with him:
I’d like to be the next Avi Schiffmann and make the next really big thing that will change everything.
Here is Avi’s website, ncov2019.live/data.
Prize for good policy thinking: The Imperial College researchers, led by Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist.
Neil and his team calculated numerically what the basic options and policy trade-offs were in the coronavirus space. Even those who disagree with parts of their model are using it as a basic framework for discussion. Here is their core paper.
The Financial Times referred to it as “The shocking coronavirus study that rocked the UK and US…Five charts highlight why Imperial College’s research radically changed government policy.”
The New York Times reported “White House Takes New Line After Dire Report on Death Toll.” Again, referring to the Imperial study.
Note that Neil is working on despite having coronavirus symptoms. His earlier actions were heroic too:
Ferguson has taken a lead, advising ministers and explaining his predictions in newspapers and on TV and radio, because he is that valuable thing, a good scientist who is also a good communicator.
Furthermore:
He is a workaholic, according to his colleague Christl Donnelly, a professor of statistical epidemiology based at Oxford University most of the time, as well as at Imperial. “He works harder than anyone I have ever met,” she said. “He is simultaneously attending very large numbers of meetings while running the group from an organisational point of view and doing programming himself. Any one of those things could take somebody their full time.
“One of his friends said he should slow down – this is a marathon not a sprint. He said he is going to do the marathon at sprint speed. It is not just work ethic – it is also energy. He seems to be able to keep going. He must sleep a bit, but I think not much.”
Prize for rapid speedy response: Curative, Inc. (legal name Snap Genomics, based in Silicon Valley)
Originally a sepsis diagnostics company, they very rapidly repositioned their staff and laboratories to scale up COVID-19 testing. They also acted rapidly, early, and pro-actively to round up the necessary materials for such testing, and they are currently churning out a high number of usable test kits each day, with that number rising rapidly. The company is also working on identifying which are the individuals most like to spread the disease and getting them tested first. here is some of their progress from yesterday.
Testing and data are so important in this area.
General remarks and thanks: I wish to thank both the founding donor and all of you who have subsequently made very generous donations to this venture. If you are a person of means and in a position to make a donation to enable this work to go further, with more prizes and better funded prizes, please do email me.
Wednesday assorted links
1. “This Article presents the first empirical examination of giving to § 501(c)(4) organizations, which have recently become central players in U.S. politics. Although donations to a 501(c)(4) are not legally deductible, the elasticity of c(4) giving to the top-bracket tax-price of charitable giving is – 1.24, very close to the elasticity for charities.” Link here. And there is no tax break for private jets, setting the record straight.
2. Ranking generals using sabermetrics, Napoleon is #1.
3. My podcast with the excellent Jocelyn Glei on self-transformation and risk.
4. Does the estate tax affect the marginal investor?
5. Eliminating the filibuster wouldn’t help much with gridlock.
6. Animal mutualism and personality (NYT).
7. ““The pending transactions on the Ethereum blockchain have spiked in the last 24 hours, mostly from CryptoKitties traffic,” CoinDesk director of research Nolan Bauerle said in an e-mail.
In the game, players buy cartoon kittens and then breed them with other cats. More than 22,000 cats have been sold so far for a total of US$3 million, according to Crypto Kitty Sales.
One of the cats went for US$117,712, although average sales price hovers about US$109, according to the sales tracker.” Link here.
Assorted links
The economics of Al Qaeda?
Such analyses are often highly speculative, but this one seems to be based on concrete data:
And, contrary to speculation that Al Qaeda in Iraq was reliant on international donations, this wasn’t a source of funding either. The group was self-financing. In fact, the core organization of Al Qaeda in Iraq in Anbar province was so profitable that it sent revenue to associates in other provinces of Iraq, and perhaps even further afield. The group raised millions of dollars annually through activities such as simple theft and resale of valuable items such as cars, generators, and electrical cable, and hijacking truckloads of goods, such as clothing. And their internal financial record-keeping was diligent, with all the requirements of expense accounts in regular businesses. A central unit of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s hierarchy required operatives to keep records of even the smallest outlay and to turn over their “take” to upper-level leaders, who made the spending decisions.